Simon Adler

Yeah.

And you...

And then me sort of following your lead, we're more like, what if we actually try to understand this problem?

And I guess now, with hindsight, I'm wondering, like, did we miss something here where we sort of played the fool?

I would say we would be useful idiots.

I didn't call you.

I'm asking if we are is the question.

I'd love to give you one more idea that I've been playing around with for a couple of years.

If I was ever going to write a short sci-fi story, it would be about the quote-unquote perfect piece of art.

You step in front of it.

It does a quick facial scan of you, pulls everything about you that it knows from the Internet, and then it puts forward an image perfectly generated for you that will evoke a feeling.

On Tuesdays, it's happiness.

On Wednesdays, it's sadness.

And so it's this visual tableau personalized to every person that evokes the same emotion.

And once you have that, once you can control the emotions of people with the flip of a dial by putting something in front of them that's going to only pique that feeling for them, then you could just control everybody.

This story was reported and produced by me, Simon Adler, with some original music and sound design by me, mixing done by Jeremy Bloom.

Of course, huge, huge thank you to Kate Klonick, as always, and yeah, we will be back next week saying some more things.

Until then, thanks for listening.

Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.